Anne McElvoy: Gosh, we’re not allowed to sound posh any more

At this rate, the Queen will be the sole remaining purveyor of the Queen’s English, ably assisted by Brian Sewell

Wednesday 9 April 2014 10:28 BST

O tempora, o mores, o Eliza Doolittle. A new trend in elocution lessons, the Times reports, involves retraining yourself to sound less posh. So advanced is the fear of sounding plummy that voice coaches are inundated with clients who want to sound less rarefied.

Do they start by saying “a lot of” instead of the genteel “a great deal of”, which marks out my public school friends? Or by learning not to describe things as “rum” and “a bit of a pickle” and to ditch “awfully”?

A less deferential society requires a tricky combination of fluency and classlessness. It is why urbane Scots like Andrew Neil and Michael Gove thrive in public life, being both eloquent yet not grating. (Don’t all tweet at once.)

David Cameron is a fluent speaker, but those patrician vowels grate. Boris Johnson masks his “yah-yah” delivery with broad comedy. Tony Blair introduced a glottal stop and “y’knows” which they most definitely did not teach him at Fettes.

Liberation awaits those of us who were brought to up speak “properly”, which meant emulating a neutral-ish RP accent. Having had our North-East accents trimmed in childhood, on the understanding that they would hold us back, we emerged to find broadcasters and political election committees positively gagging for echt dialects to display diversity. The worst thing my mother may have done for my career was stop me from speaking like Cheryl Cole. It never done her no harm.

At Oxford, a talented friend who wanted to act was distraught not to get the part of Alice in Wonderland on the amazingly stupid grounds that her accent was too northern for a child of the shires. Nowadays, there is barely a Cordelia on stage who is not invested with a broad regional lilt (the National favours the North-West).

The strange thing is that we flee from the classy accents, just as the wealthy world packs off its young to gain the polished verbal patina of the public schools. When travelling in Asia I met students with cut-glass accents, honed at Harrow and Wellington, just as we backed nervously away from those attenuated vowels.

Matt Lacey’s “gap yah” lampoon of a hopeless male Sloane on endless “intahnshups” is an astute sign of the times. Young Etonians sound much less posh than their fathers (I think we can safely say it is no longer on to call them “Fa”). When I took my son to see Another Country this week, he was as puzzled by the 1930s diction as the attitudes to homosexuality.

At this rate, the Queen will be the sole remaining purveyor of the Queen’s English, ably assisted by Brian Sewell.

Yet this is not the same as lacking gradations or abandoning prestige. London society just develops another pecking order. It demands stealth-wealth connections and fluency in corporate language, delivered with a slight tone of self-mockery. All this is a lot more effortful to keep up with than simply braying out your credentials.

The safest advice may be to ditch Henry Higgins’s advice and cultivate a not-very-anywhere accent, which can be inflected North or South, depending on where you are at the time. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him,” decrees the haughty professor.

All very reprehensible. As soon as we stop judging each other on that, we’ll find something else instead.